In a telecommunication network such as a Global System for Mobile communications (GSM), small physical cells known as picocells may serve small physical areas such as parts of a building, a street corner, or an airplane cabin. The picocell is generally smaller than a microcell, which in turn, is smaller than a macrocell. The picocells are usually used to extend a cellular coverage in a telecommunication network to indoor areas where outdoor signals do not reach well. Further the picocells add the telecommunication network capacity in areas with a very dense user equipment (UE) usage, such as at train stations. The picocells are traditionally provided for the cellular coverage or as capacity extensions in the telecommunication network and do not include any specific access control mechanism. This means that all users allowed to access the macrocells of a public land mobile network (PLMN) are also allowed to access the microcells and the picocells of the PLMN.
A femtocell is defined to indicate that the cellular coverage area provided by the femtocell in the telecommunication network is relatively small and in some cases even smaller than the cellular coverage of the picocells. The femtocells are for a limited subset of users/subscribers and their UEs, so as to allow access to the PLMN in a more user-convenient way, by providing better service offering in general (e.g. better coverage and/or lower call charge).
In WO-2007/015067, a base station for a cellular wireless communications network has a first interface, enabling connection with a remote communications device using a cellular wireless communications protocol in the cellular wireless communications network. The base station also has a second interface, enabling connection over a wide area network, and a third interface, enabling connection over a local area network. Software enables communication over the wide area network between a remote communications device, connected to the first interface, and a core network of the cellular wireless communications network.
The base station may include security functions such as air interface ciphering, VPN connection to the core network, etc. This prior art also discloses the use of a USIM card in the base station that may be used to authenticate/identify the base station towards the network.
However, this does not provide for any local access control to the base station (and its services) from the local radio interface side. The prior art is intended to provide service for the owner of the premises in which the base station is located. As described, however, this prior art would provide access basically to any user, even users not inside the premises but rather in the vicinity. As described below, this may be highly undesirable.
Prior arts arrangements are known whereby a management interface (e.g. web based) to the base station may be used to configure the base station from a personal computer, e.g. by cable connection. The configuration may include that only certain MAC addresses should be granted access. This is, however, a very inconvenient procedure as it requires a separate device and interface for the base station. Also, the user must (somehow) find out the MAC address of authorized devices which requires knowledge and skill in order to retrieve this data from a low level “system interface” of each device. Also, it is typically very inconvenient to manually (from a key board) enter long, essentially random-looking device identifiers. In addition, this type of static configuration would disable the use of the base station also for critical emergency calls. Likewise, access control by use of security standards such as WEP, WPA(2) (common in Wireless LAN access points), are also too insecure and/or cumbersome for end-users to manage.